Empiricism
by Alliriyan
Summary: Ulquiorra only believes in what can be seen and felt. And all he knows is despair. When he teaches her his sorrow, will Orihime survive the lesson? Dark Ulquihime.
1. Empiricism

Empiricism

"Until I see it, I refuse to believe it. This heart you speak of is a fallacy. There is no higher meaning to spirit particles than there is to physical matter. I could grind you to dust and not find a single grain of a metaphysical 'heart'."

Inoue glared at him. This distorted, pale monster discarding all mention of hearts, shunning the most valuable thing in her admittedly empty life: bonds. Bonds with her brother, her friends, relationships she treasured like diamonds and prayed were as unbreakable.

Though she knew they were never so safe. She had run away from her family and taken years to find a single true friend. But still, the only way to protect those bonds was to fight for them.

"Hearts are real." She glowered at the green-teared stoic. "It's right here." She clutched her hand over her own, that beat fitfully in the pain of separation from her friends and the fear of an alien environment.

Ulquiorra Schiffer let his eyelids dip slightly, giving her a chilling analytical stare. "Is that so." His voice was blunt.

"Heart is-"

She shuddered, consumed by savage clawing agony. Her eyes rolled back with the pain, barely able to register what the arrancar was holding out in his hand.

"Heart is muscle." His voice was clipped, emotionless. "Blood, tendons, nerves, flesh, valves, chambers, meat, matter, trash."

It was twitching in his palm, and the gouts of red were the most colour she'd ever seen on him.

Orihime gagged, crumpled. Red life bled out of her, dying the white dress and white floor a thousand shades of crimson. It stained her auburn hair a deeper scarlet.

Wordlessly Ulquiorra released his Resurreccion form, without a flicker of emotion he moved further into his true body. A slender, bat-winged, dismal gargoyle; acidic tear tracks burned into his thin cheeks, an ocean of sorrow flooding from the hollow bored straight through his core. The closest thing any Espada had come to achieving an arrancar's bankai. Orihime would have been fortunate, the sole person ever to see it if only her grey eyes were still functioning,

A black whip tail curled around her wrist and dragged the corpse nearer. The woman was bait, nothing more. There would be no reprimand from Aizen-sama for crushing a worthless fly. He would break her metaphysical heart now, hunt her into the mad solitude of being a Hollow.

"I will show you true despair," murmured the demon. "Your 'heart' will be worn away to a mote of emptiness, eternally tortured by pure hopelessness. And then you will wish that I had been correct."


	2. Solipsism

Solipsism

The nature of her soul was changing. She was eviscerated by emptiness, the vacuum of loneliness eating away at her feelings, her thoughts, her personality; her 'heart'.

All memories were seeping out with the ruby liquid. Falling not in spurts, for the pump had been torn out, but a smooth continuous flow. All Inoue could call to mind were bad memories. Things that had been damaging, humiliating, hurtful.

When she found a sweet memory of her brother, the pain was like a knife in her back. Sora was not here. Those laughing days with Tatsuki, they were long gone. That shy, sincere love for Kurosaki Ichigo – what proof was there it had ever existed? Colourful recollections had no substance in such a land of grey.

To be honest, when drowning under this tide of anguish, Orihime no longer believed them to be real. Lies and imaginings. Ravings of a diseased mind.

No, none of it was true.

That deeply gnawing sense of having lost everything…must therefore be natural. As inescapable as air.

False, brittle, garish dreams.

Inoue curled around herself as the wound hollowed itself out, becoming a rotten core tunnelling right through her chest.

I must be the only person in the world.

Even the cold, hard, rough ground did not seem to be really there.

Alone. All alone.

A terrifying scream began to build up inside her lungs, breaking free with the wild banshee wail of a ferocious gale. The young girl shrieked out her solitude, knowing there was no one to hear it. White bone clay was crawling up her throat, creeping out of her rictus mouth to smother her in a protective mask.

Soon burning ember eyes looked up and fused with cool viridian green. The minor Hollow felt almost soothed by his unquestionably real presence.

Orihime's despair was only a drop in the ocean of Ulquiorra's.

The last thing she saw before oblivion was an unsettling dark orb beside the scarlet heart still beating in his hand.


	3. Substance Dualism

Substance Dualism

Shit. Those memories were real. Those hallucinations were of things, no, people, she had actually lost. Here was one standing before her, carving knife of a sword ready to attack, familiar frown casting shadows over his eyes. Or had they just turned black?

The sight of his unique orange hair brought no joy to her. Look at him, so nostalgic of all the happiness she'd cherished so bitter-sweetly only a day ago. Like a floodlight at dusk, he only made the darkness deeper. Cut a sharper juxtaposition between her past and her tormented present. If she'd still been a normal Hollow, like she had been for so little time, she knew she would have devoured Ichigo in her mad need to be comforted.

As an arrancar, she could restrain that craving. But if she had to keep staring at him like this that vast gulf between the current pain and the lost joys would just keep eating, eating, eating away at her broken soul.

She hid behind Ulquiorra, hunching down. The Quattro Espada calmly fired an emerald green Gran Rey Cero at the source of her discomfort, searing their surroundings to ash.

The target survived, of course. He grated out a challenge, in an alien voice that crawled from behind his Hollow mask. "I _will_ take Inoue back home again."

His retaliation, a tidal wave of tar-black reiatsu, slammed uselessly against a golden shield. At each of its three corners was a ghost-like fairy with skeleton leaf wings. The colour of her energy had not changed, but now Ichigo could sense its sinister quality. And he noticed how the large white flowers in her hair had petals built of tiny bones, the old bloodstains bruising her dress; the dark pit where her heart once was.

"You can't," she begged, clinging to Schiffer as if he were the lifeline of her sanity, rather than the devil that had driven her insane. "You can't take me away from him." _The 'real' world would make her fall apart; taunt her ceaselessly with unattainable bliss. Soul Society would kill her._ "You mustn't. I don't want to leave this place. I have to stay here, right here; _right here_." Because only next to Ulquiorra could she feel alive, only compared to him did she appear safe and secure. "Just go, now, before they kill you."

Ichigo couldn't comprehend the depth of his own shock. But...they'd fought so hard to reach her…how could she possibly be…asking to stay? "Inoue, the shinigami will be able to do something, they can purify Hollows, right? Please –"

"I reject," she whispered, wrapping her thin arms tighter around the melancholic arrancar that wept pure green tears, who was all she could bear in the three universes. A skeletal Tsubaki leapt forwards, light trailing behind him in a golden fan.

Ulquiorra observed the ryoka now bisected on the reddening ground. Finding himself inexplicably satisfied by Orihime's actions, he leaned back slightly into her desperate embrace, and allowed the shadow of a smile to haunt his ashen face.


End file.
